Horizontal Current Bipolar Transistor DC Performance at Cryogenic Temperatures

The DC current gain (β) of Si bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) reported so far decreases at cryogenic temperatures (CT), or shows a very limited improvement at best. For temperatures above 90 K, the Horizontal Current Bipolar Transistor (HCBT) behaves comparably to other published Si BJTs. Howeve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE electron device letters 2023-10, Vol.44 (10), p.1-1
Main Authors: Bogdanovic, Filip, Markovic, Lovro, Zilak, Josip, Osrecki, Zeljko, Koricic, Marko, Suligoj, Tomislav
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
bipolar junction transistor
Bipolar transistors
Cryoforming
Cryogenic temperature
Cryogenics
Current measurement
Direct current
Electric potential
Emitters
horizontal current bipolar transistor
Junction transistors
low noise amplifier
low-temperature device modeling
low-temperature device performance
quantum computing
radio frequency transistors
Semiconductor devices
Semiconductor process modeling
Temperature dependence
Temperature distribution
Transistors
Voltage
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Summary:The DC current gain (β) of Si bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) reported so far decreases at cryogenic temperatures (CT), or shows a very limited improvement at best. For temperatures above 90 K, the Horizontal Current Bipolar Transistor (HCBT) behaves comparably to other published Si BJTs. However, cryogenic measurements of HCBT devices show a steep β increase at temperatures below 90 K. We report a current gain of 85 at 300 K, a minimum β of 31 at 90 K and an increase of β to 66 at 17 K. The collector-emitter breakdown voltage ( BV CEO ) measured around the peak β varies only within 0.2 V over the examined temperature range. Additionally, the Early voltage ( V A ) increases for temperatures below 50 K, improving the β V A product at 20 K by 2.2x as compared to 300 K, which makes the HCBT a potentially attractive technology for deep cryogenic applications. TCAD simulations of an equivalent Si BJT structure show that such considerable increase of β at CT can be attributed to the interplay between incomplete ionization (II) of acceptors in the base and bandgap narrowing (BGN) in the emitter in a specific range of HCBT doping profiles.
ISSN:0741-3106
1558-0563
DOI:10.1109/LED.2023.3309700